Consumers and Curators: Browsing and Voting Patterns on Reddit

TL;DR

This study analyzes Reddit user activity over a year, revealing that most users vote without reading posts and that cognitive fatigue affects voting behavior, providing insights into social news curation.

Contribution

Introduces a new dataset of Reddit activity logs and analyzes browsing and voting patterns, highlighting behaviors like voting without reading and cognitive fatigue effects.

Findings

73% of posts were rated without viewing content

Most users do not read articles before voting

Cognitive fatigue influences browsing and voting behavior

Abstract

As crowd-sourced curation of news and information become the norm, it is important to understand not only how individuals consume information through social news Web sites, but also how they contribute to their ranking systems. In the present work, we introduce and make available a new dataset containing the activity logs that recorded all activity for 309 Reddit users for one year. Using this newly collected data, we present findings that highlight the browsing and voting behavior of the study's participants. We find that most users do not read the article that they vote on, and that, in total, 73% of posts were rated (ie, upvoted or downvoted) without first viewing the content. We also show evidence of cognitive fatigue in the browsing sessions of users that are most likely to vote.

Full text

See pages 1-last of RedditPerformanceStudy.pdf